RE Manages the Full Lifecycle of Electronic Documents

One of Rational Enterprise’s most compelling value propositions is comprehensive Information Governance, which encompasses all aspects of information management, including information accessibility, reliability, security, privacy, retention, destruction, preservation and collection. Ultimately, IG is about recognizing that information is both an asset and a liability, and that by controlling the latter you increase the former.

The single largest challenge for successful Information Governance is over-reliance on end users. The information explosion has left knowledge-workers drowning in content and expecting users to change work habits to ensure policy compliance with directives from Legal, Compliance, IT, Records Management, and others, is both unreasonable and unrealistic. To address this challenge, RE focuses on three core pieces of functionality:

Centralized visibility into all manageable information where it resides.

RE addresses the IGRM and EDRM in ways that no other technology does. RE’s focus on the upstream, proactive approach to information governance represents a paradigm shift away from the more traditional, incremental, and reactive approach to managing unstructured corporate data, bridging the gap between information lifecycle management and e-discovery. Well before discovery efforts for any litigation or investigation, RG has identified and established requisite control, including policy-driven management, over all unstructured ESI across desktops, email servers, file shares, and document management systems.

RE Employs Advanced Technology

Rational Enterprise has also begun to elevate even the more advanced technologies found in e-discovery products. For instance, while RE and other e-discovery vendors use machine-learning categorization tools to code documents automatically during the review phase, RE applies this same technology to classifying documents into policies prior to a dispute, litigation, or investigation. Applied to policy classification, machine-learning ensures that documents are quickly, accurately, and consistently organized and easily accessible for document requests. Automated, real-time content classification also has several important Information Governance use cases away from discovery.

Accomplishing this level of visibility and control without asking users to change how they work is unprecedented. The result is both cost savings and risk reduction.

RE Uniquely Improves the E-Discovery Process

Rational Enterprise makes e-discovery more effective and efficient by centralizing and automating the entire process. Ensuring policy enforcement will dramatically reduce the overall universe of discoverable documents when litigation inevitability occurs; and when litigation does arise, enterprises will be able to identify, preserve, and analyze all of its unstructured data immediately to ensure that any and only likely relevant documents are included. Similarly, the volume of documents an organization must preserve, hold, collect, and review decrease because finding the relevant documents is simplified:

Search terms and machine-learning models can be applied to the entire universe of data at the source and intermittently, without regular disruption to the organization, so that truly responsive documents are found;

Holds can be managed in place and in-house;

Preliminary review is immediate and can be shifted from outside to inside counsel, increasing the reliability of document review and decreasing legal costs; and

Collection efforts can be more dynamic with continual access to enterprise data, but are non-disruptive, as physical collection is no longer necessary.

The result is that organizations can extract a defensible body of documents from their mass of unstructured data easily, quickly, and cost effectively. The work required of contract lawyers is dramatically lessened and access to documents implicated by litigation or investigation is returned to counsel responsible for preparing a case.. The process is simpler, more transparent, and cheaper, without undercutting, but rather, enhancing the integrity of document identification, collection, review, and production.

Furthermore, RE does not expose enterprise data to unnecessary risk: litigation data can be hosted in a highly secure cloud environment, the platform is most effective when installed behind the client’s firewall; data remains as protected as any other enterprise data and access to outside counsel and third parties is easily and securely granted.